Camile Thai sells Thai food which aims to be healthy, sustainable and delicious. It started in 2010 and has grown to 52 branches, primarily in Ireland but also with some in the UK. It is a high growth restaurant franchise and as the company expanded, it realised it needed a single finance platform to support each franchise. It chose AccountIQ’s cloud-based accounting solution to support continued expansion and master a complex accounting process.
The challenge
The Camile Thai franchise has been keeping Ireland happy with its delicious and healthy ‘good mood Thai food’ since 2010. Since then, it’s grown to 52 branches and is now expanding in the UK. This phenomenal success was recognised with the 2022 Irish Franchise of the Year award.
But operating a franchise enterprise, where one franchisee can operate multiple restaurants, means that consolidation becomes a very time-consuming task each month for head office. And due to rapid growth, additional pressure and responsibility falls on the finance and accounting team. As the company expanded, it got to the point where Camile Thai’s Head of Finance, Maurice Woulfe, understood that it had outgrown its existing QuickBooks solution, which couldn’t provide the necessary functionality to support the growth.
As a result, Camile Thai turned to AccountsIQ for a more complete solution that matched the company’s ambitions. With the focus on supporting every franchise to be as successful as possible, Camile Thai needed to ensure that all franchises could access the accounting system easily, so that they were able to focus on running their restaurants and leave the rest to the head office.
Furthermore, expanding regionally meant that Camile Thai needed a clear way to analyse performance by location and quickly and accurately work out how new growth would impact cash flow.
The solution
To facilitate the expansion of the business, Camile Thai turned to AccountsIQ to be the single finance platform for the entire business. AccountsIQ allows Camile Thai to easily set up in new franchises, while providing visibility at the head office level and an open API to integrate with the rest of its business.
“We’ve been using AccountsIQ as our main accounting software for about five years. AccountsIQ facilitates growth; we can add new restaurants and still consolidate monthly. It’s all really easy,” said Woulfe.
AccountsIQ’s software suits a franchise business model because every franchisee can use the same cloud-based system. “Each restaurant has its own database,” explained Woulfe. “Like other companies might have departments, we have a separate database for each restaurant. But, because AccountsIQ is cloud-based, they’re all integrated and can talk to each other. That’s crucial for us because we need complete visibility across the network.”
Using AccountsIQ has helped to reduce the time taken to perform core functions within the financial department. A process that took up to 12 days using its previous software, can now be undertaken within eight days, reducing the time taken by a third. But according to Woulfe, this is not the only efficiency that AccountsIQ delivers.
“The other timesaving benefit is the ease of adding on a new database when we open a location. A new database can be seamlessly added on to the existing consolidated accounts without any of the complications that was associated with our prior software provider,” explained Woulfe.
Because AccountsIQ is cloud-based, rolling it out to new Camile Thai franchisees is quick and easy and brings significant benefits.
“We always encourage new franchisees to use AccountsIQ,” said Camile Thai’s Financial Accountant, Eoghain Grant. “We can set them up and transfer the business ownership very quickly. In fact, it’s ready right out of the box. We don’t need to configure anything; our franchisees just read the help file and they’re ready to go with it.”
Ease of use is essential for franchisees, as they’re not normally trained accountants. But Camile Thai’s head office finance team are also enjoying the benefits of using AccountsIQ. “Our business model is complex, but AccountsIQ gives us full visibility,” said Woulfe.
A key element to the success of the software is its ability to integrate with MarketMan, a leading cloud-based restaurant management system. This functionality provides even more granular financial business intelligence information. Through this connection, Camile Thai gets detailed information on everything from its stock levels to its most profitable dishes, allowing it to run profit level variance analysis.
As well as being a bonus for the head office, this means restaurant managers only have a single system to master. There’s no more manual invoice entry or duplications to undertake as all the data is fed into AccountsIQ at the back end.
The outcome
AccountsIQ has been a huge timesaver for Camile Thai at month end with the multi-dimensional reporting processes. The move has allowed it to shorten the month end reporting timetable, and it can now produce a completed profit & loss (P&L) and balance sheet for the board of directors within eight working days.
This efficiency from within the finance department radiates to the rest of the company. Woulfe’s finance team can now provide more accurate and timely information to the rest of the business, thereby facilitating better decision-making. For example, the war in Ukraine had a material impact on input costs. Having up-to-date and trustworthy financial performance information was essential in allowing Camile Thai to make the right commercial decisions by the board to steer the business in the right direction in reaction to external events and disruptions.
Effort is also saved on analysing results, as the team uses the multi-dimensional reporting to drill down to a full P&L for each restaurant and to produce consolidated monthly reports for its management team.
Camile Thai has found AccountsIQ to be extremely well suited to running the finances of a complex and growing franchise.
“It makes life so much easier,” concluded Woulfe. “It’s cloud-based so you don’t need a lot of processing power; you can run it on a small laptop in a restaurant. There are no issues with upgrades because they’re done automatically. You also don’t need to be an experienced accountant to use it and you don’t need an IT person to install it. We just send our restaurant managers a link, they open it, job done!”